"There is a growing concern in the humanity for the intangible heritage consisting of works based upon culture and tradition. Languages stand out among these traditions, as an element that incarnates the being and the history of peoples, much better than the reality marked by administrative frontiers and geopolitical realities”.

Therefore, languages are the most important intangible heritage of the Humanity.

The UNESCO, conscious of the need to preserve and to develop this heritage, has prioritized among its objectives the protection of these cultural spaces.

On occasion of the international LINGUAPAX seminary, celebrated in Leioa (1996), the former General Director of the UNESCO, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, pointed out the need to elaborate a first report about the state of languages in the world, in order to make people aware of the concern about the linguistic heritage and to protect living languages.

After the results of that report, 1800 languages disappeared from 1970 (4500 languages) to 1985 (2700 tongues). If this tendency does not change, during this century 90% of the linguistic heritage of the humanity could disappear.

The processes of linguistic substitution require deep studies to determine their main causes. The report of the UNESCO mentioned causes such as emigration, pressure made by governments and dominant cultures, etc.

This dominance is also supported by the power of the media, more and more globalized as time goes by, which have a deep impact on all social groups.

The UNESCO urges individuals, groups and societies to mobilize after the preservation of this intangible heritage of the humanity.

Sharing the points of view expressed by the UNESCO, a group of people and institutions have created the METALINGUA UNESCO foundation, wanting to make a contribution to the organized endeavor towards the protection of language richness.

The Foundation is conscious of the enormous effort demanded by the advance of humanity towards the protection of languages, taking into account that the current situation is the opposite. This effort has to be first directed at diminishing and braking the tendencies of linguistic substitution, to be able to hop afterwards to new stages of positive development and evolution of the minority languages.

After analyzing the essential competences and resources contributed by its members, the Foundation has chosen its main objective: contributing to the linguistic heritage development project of the UNESCO from the approach of the digital society.

This specialization of the Foundation will allow it to analyze the particular factors of linguistic substitution acting in the Information Society, or better said, on the Information Societies.

Globalization is even more intense in the world of information, placing certain majority languages in levels still higher (relating to the quantity of published information) than those of the number of speakers, to such an extent that some languages, even from Europe, with dozens of millions of speakers are placed on a minority and weak situation.

Nonetheless, globalization has also brought the connection to minority languages, and has provided us with the opportunity to access to enormous amounts of information that could bring a new impulse for these languages.

The foundational objective of METALINGUA UNESCO is therefore to work after the linguistic diversity of the Information Society.

Multilinguale, as it has been exposed, is a micro synthesis which enables maternal expression with an international lexis and multilingual understanding, easy to learn and easy to understand in an intuitive way.

Metalingua is a macro representation of the natural languages, which reflects all their intrinsic and extrinsic features. This representation of maximums makes possible the using of the metalingua system as a translation system (one of its multiple possible applications). It transforms every sentence in its representation in metalingua, and from this one to another representation in another language. In this way, metalingua can be used as a universal translation system, based on the principles of the universal grammar, which creates a bridge between languages. Metalingua works with maximums and reflects every particularity of every language. To be able to reflect them, a deep analysis is carried out in different levels, for example: morphologic, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, functional…

The combination of both systems makes possible the automatic representation of contents in multilinguale from the languages available in Metalingua.